Wild Woman Fest 2017

We Were Moved. We Were Fed. We Were Wild.5 days of Freedom:Yoga, Dance, Circles, Talks, Workshops, Rituals,Moon Baths, Music, Meditation & moreON TOP OF A MOUNTAIN

Living Your Power AND Softness​(I will lead this workshop in the Waning Moon Weekend, August 9-13)

~

As women have more opportunity and feel the call to bring their voice and vision to the world,harmonizing our masculine and feminine essences— the forward moving, action-oriented energies with our more nurturing, receptive ones --can be truly confusing.

Yin and yang energies live in every aspect of nature, and in all genders.Sometimes they work together to bring a sense of satisfaction and joy.But like a see-saw, equal balance is almost never possible.We’re most often either focused in one direction of the other.

We’ve been raised in a patriarchal culturethat values the masculine energies of productivity and efficiency over those of nurturance and sponteneity. Competition is prized over collaboration,goal over process,the rights of the individual over those of the collective.Often we don’t notice this imbalance, except that we begin to lose our happiness.When our success is founded on thehyper-masculine,we can’t help but find our lives skewed toward force over inspiration,the rational to the exclusion of the intuitive,what’s practical over what brings real joy.

When these yang energies lose their internal integrity— when they become unhealthy or fail to mature --we see them in our culture and ourselves as self-abuse, isolation, and harsh, perfectionistic, or dogmatic behavior that robs us of the joy that the yin energies bring to our lives.At those times what we most need is the healthy feminine, but out of desperation, we can fall into an abyss of attitudes and behaviors common to the hyper-feminine: despair, loss of libido, obsessive self-doubt, helpless-ness and over-indulgence.

In the era of Trump we have a poster-child for what immature masculine energy looks like.Dominating, arrogant, and condescending treatment of others is the outward displayof what can happen in a culture that continues to devalue the feminine.

~

Most people in Western culture bounce back and forth between those polar extremes,obsessively over-working and then vegging out in front of the TV with a pint of ice cream.Then they panic, flood themselves with guilt and remorse, and rush back to work.They lose their sense of what would be healthy and reviving,allowing their less-than-whole, fear-induced tendencies to be healed by the healthy opposite.

We tend to push too hard in the hyper-masculine, then zone out in the hyper-feminine.This exhausts us and minimizes our joy and effectiveness.

What we most need is to allow ourselves to be held by the healthy masculine aspects — the structured, purposeful, courageous waxing moon --to teach us how to surrender and relax into the healthy feminine waning moon.

In a similar way,when people — no matter their gender — authentically honor the moon's waning aspects-- the nurturing, reflective, gentle feminine --then there’s no need to lapse back into the abyssof the obsessive, harsh, controlling and uber-independent hyper-masculine.

In this interactive workshopwe will learn to play with the masculine and feminine energies,identifying, strengthening, and harmonize them for greater joy and wholeness.